1775Sec: Um, we were trolling for, er, Aaron Swartz...

Pranksters latched onto an outage at Dropbox on Friday to push false rumours of a politically motivated hack.

A group calling itself 1775Sec claimed that it had taken advantage of a vulnerability to knock out the widely used sync-and-share service. These claims were reported by sections of the media over the weekend.

Dropbox denied the claim on Sunday, stating that the outage had happened after routine maintenance went awry and apologising for the resulting problems.

The entire service was rendered unavailable by the snafu for around three hours with lingering problems intermittently affecting the service for much longer, a statement on Dropbox's official blog explains.

On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.

While we restored most functionality three hours later, some users continued experiencing issues throughout the weekend across dropbox.com, our desktop client, and our mobile apps. Dropbox should now be up and running for all of you, but we’re working through a few last issues with the Dropbox photos tab.

1775Sec withdrew claims of a cyber attack even before Dropbox's initial denials, stating that its boasts were a ruse designed to expose credulous tech reporting.

"Did anyone bother to do some research. lol. We made the Internet Reporters look like fools! That is what we did in your honor Aaron Swartz," the group said in a Twitter update.

1775Sec, self-described purveyors of ‪#OpTrollSec‬ For the Lulz, has since since claimed that it has managed to get its hands on an Apple database, posting a supposed sample on Pastebin ahead of a threatened leak on Tuesday. ®